Dark Horse (22 page)
‘You were in shock. You’d been hit.’
‘Yeah, by Tansy.’
‘No, Sarah, he hit you. All he did was hit you. He wanted you so far down you couldn’t get back up. He took Tansy to finish you.’
In the last of the light Sarah looked again at the photos. She touched each one, then collected them together into a pile, putting the best one of Tansy on top.
‘He knew I’d go for her. The security cameras weren’t to stop me; they were to catch me. He was dressed because he was waiting for me.
He
knew no one would be there Christmas Day. And he knew I wouldn’t wait. She couldn’t be stabled. She’d be frightened. He took her Christmas Eve because he knew I’d go straight for her. In that footage he was saying . . . I’d lost her for good, he was going to call the police and I’d never get her back.’
‘You don’t have to explain.’
‘Don’t I?’
‘Not to me.’
‘Even my parents are going to struggle to acknowledge me.’
‘That’s because they’re not very good parents.’
‘It’s never going to go away. Think of your first impression of me. I saw the look in your eye. You were frightened of me. That’s not a good start.’ She motioned around the room. ‘This is not a good start.’
‘My first impression of you was out by the bog. Where you were this wet, dark, sexy saviour. You’ve never stopped being that.’
‘You thought I was crazy.’
‘I thought you were desperate. I thought you were someone with nothing to lose. The longer we were there, the more that changed.’ He leaned to one side, his elbow propped on the table, his face growing more shadowed in the dim light. ‘You realised you had something to lose.’
‘I can’t fit in with your life, your friends. You’re not thinking this through.’
‘I’ve thought it through. Actually . . . the two of us had it completely sorted without even knowing, remember in the hut?’ He smiled. ‘Our plan to take Tansy to a secret location, slipping you a note, even down to me picking you up in a dark car.’
She said gently back, ‘Yeah, shame we weren’t also right about the five mill in unmarked bills.’
‘But I haven’t told you yet about the offers I’ve had to tell my story.’
They didn’t turn on the light. They sat in the dark at the table, eating Brody’s mother’s plum pudding. Night noises from the gardens were crisp, and delicate too. The temperature had dropped. He was on his side of the table. She was on hers.
He stood and began to clear away the dessert bowls. He put the custard and cream back in the fridge. The fridge light illuminated him. Sarah watched. When he’d said Jamie was better looking, it would have only been that his brother was older, more lived-in, and manlier because of it, wiser too. In the year that had passed, Brody had become more lived-in and manly, wiser. He’d caught up to his brother.
In the glare of the refrigerator light, he suddenly straightened.
‘Hey, Sarah?’
‘Yep.’
‘Had you been drinking that night?’
‘I drank every night.’
‘Had you taken those painkillers too?’
‘I know what you’re thinking. But if being drunk and on painkillers was a true defence, the law would allow for it, and it doesn’t.’
‘They had a strong reaction in you though. Do you even remember how badly affected you were up the mountain when I mixed them? You were out of it. You could hardly work out who I was. And you’d mixed the two that night? How many painkillers did you have?’
‘My barrister said drug and substance abuse isn’t a defence.’
‘But you’d taken them together?’
‘Yes.’
‘Many?’
‘More than the packet suggests.’
‘Jesus, Sarah.’ He shut the fridge door. ‘Well that explains why you took the gun.’
‘It doesn’t excuse it though.’
He returned to the table and they sat in silence across from one another. Up the mountain, it would have been a matter of guesswork – what did he really think of her? what was he feeling? what was the truth? For a second or two Sarah slipped into mountain behaviour, pulling her thoughts in, holding her tongue, guarding herself. Then she remembered that part was over. They had nothing to hide. She was free to open up.
‘I told my dad about the sexual abuse,’ she said. ‘My psychiatrist made me write separate letters, one to Mum, one to Dad, telling them what happened, how it made me feel. Not blaming, just telling in writing.’
‘What did your father say?’
‘He said these “mental houses” alter memories and plant things in patients’ heads, things that never happened, as a justification for all the shrinks’ overpaid positions.’
‘
O
-kay. And your mum?’
‘No comment from her at all.’
‘Wow.’ Brody blinked and widened his eyes a couple of times. ‘You really drew the short straw with those two didn’t you?’
‘You’re right, Brody – up the mountain, I knew I couldn’t lose you.’
‘You’re not going to.’
‘Do you love me?’
‘Like a demon.’
Side by side in the bed, in complete darkness, Sarah said, ‘I’ll tell you something I wasn’t going to tell anyone, ever. There was a stag on the bridge with Tansy and me when the flood came through. It was right there beside us, with us when the water hit, next to us as we jumped, he landed with us. I looked right at him, and he looked at me; it was like we understood one another. When things come down to the wire like that, there’s so little to understand, just the basics. Surviving. I saw a picture of him on one of your trail cams. There was this moment on the bridge as the water came, when I almost fell off Tansy. The stag glanced back at me. It was suddenly clear to me. The confusion disappeared, the sadness changed. That deer showed me that it’s not a sin to do whatever it takes to keep going. The sin is letting the water sweep you away without a fight. The deer, Tansy and me, we escaped. Instinctively we knew what to do. Below all the noise and confusion there was honesty, the absolute truth. We never lost touch with what was real. I think that’s the way it was with you and me. Underneath it all, we knew what mattered; we knew what we were doing. Surviving. I guess that’s why it never felt wrong between us. And why it feels so right to keep going.’
MICHAEL JOSEPH
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First published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2013
Text copyright © Honey Brown, 2013
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Extract reprinted with permission from
The Rabbits
by John Marsden and Shaun Tan, Lothian Children’s Books, an imprint of Hachette Australia, 1998.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Cover design by Alex Ross © Penguin Group (Australia)
Cover photograph by Guillermo Carballa / Trevillion Images
ISBN: 978-1-74253-833-4
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